China wants hundreds of millions of new smart meters -- but they’ve got to be cheap, they’ve got to be rugged, and they’ve got to be built (mostly) in China. That doesn’t mean foreign competitors can’t build what goes inside them, however.

Take Singapore-based Semitech, which announced Tuesday that its powerline communications (PLC) chips are being deployed in China, nestled inside Chinese meters built by LangFang Gao. The two have installed more than 5,000 Semitech-based PLC smart meters in two residential sites for building submetering and one village site for remote reading of meters, according to a press release.

Five thousand down, hundreds of millions more to go. China is by far the world’s biggest future smart grid market. It’s expected to outpace the United States in overall spending by mid-decade. A December report by research firm MarketLine predicts China’s electricity market will grow from $355 billion in 2010 to $762.3 billion by 2015.

Semitech says its technology “uses modulation and signal processing technology that is adjustable in speed but also frequency-agile to deliver highly robust and reliable communications.” Robust and reliable are the key items here -- China wants its smart meters to talk over power lines across the country, which means lots of rural patches with “dirty,” or unstable, power grids.